Ira Cahill Stevens, a young Union soldier taken captive by Confederates during the Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864, finds himself fighting a new battle as the novel opens. One waged within the head and heart against "the dead nothingness of despair". It's a bad time to be a prisoner-of-war. The long and acrimonious debate over prisoner exchanges has come to a stalemate, and Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant has halted all exchanges in order to prevent released Confederates from immediately returning to their regiments. As a result, prison camps are desperately overcrowded and conditions fatally dire -- often tantamount to a death sentence. With Ira is Gus, a seasoned soldier and religious man who believes U.S. Grant synonymous with the Almighty; Marinus, cynical, learned, and brooding, who appears to have some tragic secret; Louis, a practical and unscrupulous man of action; and Willy, a boy who escaped from an orphanage to enlist, hoping for better food in the Army of the Potomac. Together they make up a "family" in a world that becomes increasingly absurd and barbaric, one in which rumors of imminent exchange and the threat of death wreak as much havoc on the psyche as starvation, filth, overcrowding, and brutality do on the body.